


Fifteen Ways to Die Horribly at Wormit Bay on 28 December, 1879

by sharkie



Category: The Tay Bridge Disaster - William McGonagall
Genre: Gen, Parody, Yuletide Madness, Yuletide Madness 2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-23
Updated: 2018-10-23
Packaged: 2019-08-06 08:46:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16384949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sharkie/pseuds/sharkie
Summary: Wear chapstick when kissing the Tay Bridge.





	Fifteen Ways to Die Horribly at Wormit Bay on 28 December, 1879

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lnhammer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lnhammer/gifts).



> William McGonagall's ['The Tay Bridge Disaster'](http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk/gems/the-tay-bridge-disaster) retold in the style of Daphne Gottlieb's ['Fifteen Ways to Stay Alive'](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/626424-fifteen-ways-to-stay-alive-1-offer-the-wolves-your).

  1. Offer Boreas only half of your Sabbath tithe. Leave the rest. Do not offer him your entire income. Do not offer him your other assets. Do not let him near your stocks, your shadier investments. Soon it will be New Year’s. You need money for balloons.



 

  1. Wear chapstick when kissing the Tay Bridge.



 

  1. Pretend you have adequate buttresses.



 

  1. Pretend you can circumvent structural weakness with a fifteen-point list.



 

  1. Offer the Tay Bridge to Boreas. Offer Boreas to Edinburgh.



 

  1. Only watch the iron rust. Wind pressure could cause wobbling. Or collapse.



 

  1. Don’t inhale. Pray that the Storm Fiend doesn’t exhale.



 

  1. Realize that this poem for a trainwreck is a trainwreck, is a severely flawed bridge breaking as a locomotive crosses its high girder during a terrible storm, is the 1879 disaster where an un-buttressed iron structure gave way due to heavy wind pressure and killed seventy-five people (not ninety, as reported), but is not the poem about the Tay Whale. That poem is still to come.



 

  1. Wait for the central girders to fracture as the wind howls.



 

  1. Practice your final words, desperate vocalizations as you plummet. Learn them in English, French, Spanish: _AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH_



 

  1. Don’t kiss trainwrecks. Don’t write about them. Don’t write.



 

  1. Pretend you made up Edinburgh, and only Dundee exists.



 

  1. Pretend there is no city except Dundee.



 

  1. Pretend there was no poem so bad that it became infamous, pretend that it does not have two sequels, pretend like your belief in the intrinsic beauty of language depends on it because it does. Pretend there is no wreck - you watched the train reach the high girder and felt the smoke on your face and couldn't see for several minutes because this was 1879 and that was it. Another train passing. You do not need trains. You can call an Uber. And it can swim to Dundee.



 

  1. It’s a commemorative poem! You can’t forget.




End file.
